Planning a Data Center Migration: Industry Insights, Tips & Notes on India

Reasons for Data Center Migration

Business	Technology
-        Strategic Move -        Regulatory Requirements -        Merger/ Demerger	-        Consolidation of multiple Regional DCs -        Obsolete data center facilities -        Legacy IT infrastructure -        Fully utilized, out of capacity

Industry Insights on Data Center Migration

• By 2011 more than 70% of U.S. enterprise data centers will face tangible disruptions related to floor space, energy consumption and/or costs.
• 94% of IT departments are either considering or undertaking a server migration program. These initiatives are the most effective ways to lower operations costs (TOC) in a company’s data center and estimates that businesses can save up to 23% of annual costs with a properly executed plan for server migration.

Source: Gartner

• Estimates range from $300 – $400 per foot to move existing equipment and $750 – $1,000 per foot to implement new equipment

Source: Aperture

Planning for Migration

-        Decide to Build or Lease the new facility

-        Conduct a Site Suitability Analysis

-        Plan Thoroughly and Well in Advance

-        Minimize Complexity and Change

-        Be 100% Focused on Move Day

Tips for Planning Data Center Migration

• Even organizations that have fairly simple data center operations and/or very thorough documentation should begin planning well in advance of a move
• Companies should begin planning three to six months in advance  – DataMove
• Know the maximum tolerable downtime for an application
• Companies should allow plenty of lead time, especially when setting up high-bandwidth WAN connections from telco providers. – Networking Unlimited. Verizon requires a 90-day lead time for setting up WAN services.
• If applications are to be made available during the move, then redundancy and alternate site considerations are important. Eg. Company Website
• Power and Networking, are the 2 issues that surface most during a data center relocation. -Forsythe
• Consider the network latency for applications resulting due to the distance of the new facility from the existing users (or offices).
• Also, check if your equipments have ‘location-specific’ warranties from their manufacturers
• Divide the equipment to be moved into distinct move groups that correlate with a move sequence, placement in the new location and grouped according to priority or mission criticality. Applications that have a High Business Impact should normally be spread over multiple ‘move groups’ to lessen risk
• Evaluate which equipment will be retired and replaced at the new location, thus reducing the cost of relocation.
• Use the migration as an opportunity to implement Virtualization and other modern day data center technologies
• Consider engaging a third-party consulting firm to orchestrate the relocation, coordinate with the OEM vendors and the trucking companies, and to serve as relocation project manager.
• Establish backup contingency plans for each phase of the move and determine how critical applications will be supported if any phase of the move is delayed.

Typical Parameters for Application Migration

Source: EMC2

Signing Out Notes on India

• In India, infrastructure support like logistics & electricity may not be 100% reliable. So plan by keeping a buffer for the migration activities.
• Often, you might be required to have particular type of equipments (eg. Energy saving) when moving your facility to a Special Economic Zone (SEZ) in India.
• Often SEZs (like the one at Kharadi, Pune) wont allow your existing desktops, etc to be moved into the new premise. You will have to buy new equipments for the new premise. New equipments will be available at special rates in SEZs & many big equipment brands have tie-ups with the SEZs.
• Also, have proper tax papers (eg. any applicable import/excise taxes) done for other equipments when moving to such an area.
• SEZs also may also lay norms on activities that you can conduct from the premise.
• All in all, read the offer document carefully before investing!

Although these tips give an overall picture of the planning, do seek the help of professional consultants. Their proven expertise will help in hassle-free migration, which otherwise will be a pain area.

Do not forget to notify the users and other stakeholders of the migration activity & any resultant downtime.

Case Study – HSBC, India

Background

• Core Banking Data Center Based in Mumbai
• IT function in banking must be able to support the business with total integrity and without interruption

Reason for Migration

• Premium Office Space & Maintenance costs
• Consolidate physical servers through virtualization to save costs

Risks in Transiting existing equipment

• Longer transport  time
• Risk of damaging equipments/data during transport
• Intolerable Downtime

Approach Followed

• 3^rd Party experts: Pentagon Systems and Services
• Used PlateSpin Migrate from Novell
• ‘Decoupled’ workload from underlying server hardware and streamed them to virtual hosts
• Each server was moved during weekends on a four-week cycle
• The whole migration was completed within six months

Results

• Low-impact migration of servers
• No complexities of physical transportation
• Achieved inter-city migration of more than 100 servers across a distance of 387 miles
• Virtualized 40 servers, enabling hardware consolidation, increased flexibility and reduced costs
• Maintained complete system availability during working hours, minimizing user disruption

Read the entire case at Express Computer Online

Reading Between the lines of The Indian IT Act, PART 1

This is first in a series of articles on the IT Act of India. I had this copy of the Indian IT Act for a while now & began going through it today. It doesn’t seem to be too exhaustive. I have read 9 pages from it. And I have the following for you:

Quick Facts about the Act:

• Actual name: The Information Technology Act, 2000
• Published as a part of ‘The Gazette of India, Extraordinary’ (Bharat Ka Rajpatr, Asadharan)
• Consent of the (then) President received for the IT Act : 9^th June, 2000
• It is recommended in the Act that if any state government wishes to make any amendments/changes, they should first refer the Model Law
• Interestingly, India’s IT Act is a derivative of Model Law on Electronic Commerce adopted by the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (dated 30^th June 1997)

As you might be aware that all Laws/Acts have terms defined which are given a reference later. (& anything beyond the scope of the said terms becomes an exception!!). The definitions were a rerun of Basic Network Security class! It contains all the terms – digital signature, asymmetric keys, public/private keys, hashing et al!

Interestingly I came across some interesting definitions as well.

(Note: Below ‘ze’ is used in the Act as all the 26 alphabets were used and the list restarted from za, zb,…)

Section 2. Definitions

(ze) “secure system” means computer hardware, software, and procedure that—

(a) are reasonably secure from unauthorized access and misuse;

(b) provide a reasonable level of reliability and correct operation;

(c) are reasonably suited to performing the intended functions; and

(d) adhere to generally accepted security procedures;

Nowhere have they referred to what is reasonable!

(zh) “verify” in relation to a digital signature, electronic record or public key, with its grammatical variations and cognate expressions means to determine whether—

(a) the initial electronic record was affixed with the digital signature by the use of private key corresponding to the public key of the subscriber;

(b) the initial electronic record is retained intact or has been altered since such electronic record was so affixed with the digital signature.

Grammatical & Cognate Variations of a DS for verification? Interesting!

Section 9.  Sections 6,7 and 8 not to confer right to insist document should be accepted in electronic form.

Nothing contained in sections 6, 7 and 8 shall confer a right upon any person to insist that any Ministry or Department of the Central Government or the State Government or any authority or body established by or under any law or controlled or funded by the Central or State Government should accept, issue, create, retain and preserve any document in the form of electronic records or effect any monetary transaction in the electronic form.

Section 6 is about Use of electronic records and digital signatures in Government and its agencies.

7. Retention of electronic records.

8.  Publication of rule, regulation, etc., in Electronic Gazette.

I didn’t feel the need of quoting all these sections here as they are apt in the content. Point to see here is that the Govt. doesn’t take responsibility to retain & preserve any document any electronic form. There goes your Right to Information (RTI) Act for a toss!!

Calling all Lawyers and Cyber Crime Specialists!

(To be continued…)